NINA LEARNS THE TRUTH.
Miss Drusilla, the maid-servants, the boy-of-all-work, all in various
disheveled stages of attire that but for the warmth of the night might
have been productive of colds and catarrhs, appeared precipitately in
the room, and when they saw the young mistress of Selwyn Heights they
thought they understood the meaning of Kitty’s outcry.
“It is the ghost, the ghost! Kitty said she would sleep in the room
and catch it,” cried the maids, and one or two, more fearful than the
rest, ran out into the hall again, unable to endure the proximity of a
visitant from the other world.
But Miss Drusilla Strangemore being made of sterner stuff than those
weak-minded ones, walked straight up to her niece and laid her hand on
her shoulder.
“So it is really you, Nina,” she said, with a touch of tenderness in
her stern, old voice, “Oh, my dear, how glad I am that you have come
home at last. We have grieved for you so much, for we believed you
dead.”
And she put her arms around the trembling girl and shed some furtive
tears of joy on the top of the golden head.
“I would have been dead if I had had my way, Aunt Drusilla,” the girl
answered, bitterly, but she returned the caresses of the old lady, and
felt as she had done with Kitty that it was pleasant to be with her
again, for although Miss Drusilla had a hard, stern nature, she had
always been kind to the orphan girl confided to her care.
“And you, Kitty,” said Miss Drusilla, looking over the top of Nina’s
head, and feeling compelled to scold somebody to check her rushing
tears, “aren’t you ashamed of yourself, shrieking out, and raising a
regular hullabaloo at the sight of your young mistress? Didn’t you
have sense enough to know that she was not a ghost?”
“Why yes, ma’am, of course. It wasn’t Miss Nina that frightened me--no,
not if it _had_ been her ghost instead of her dear blessed self. It was
the other one that made me scream,” Kitty answered.
“The other one?” Miss Strangemore interrogated, with an air of
mystification.
“Mrs. St. Alban, ma’am,” explained Kitty.
“Lord-a-mercy!”
“Um-me, tother one, too!”
“_She_ walks!”
“I leaves this haunted house to-morrow!”
These disjointed exclamations from the servants followed pell mell upon
Kitty’s words. The women huddled together with frightened faces, gazing
half terrified at Nina, as if her ghostliness and the other’s combined,
were too much for weak human endurance.
“Kitty, you are crazy.” Miss Strangemore said, shortly.
“Very well, ma’am, you may doubt my word if you like, but ask Miss Nina
here what made me scream.”
Nina lifted her pale, weary looking face from her aunt’s shoulder.
“We were in here alone, Kitty and I,” she said, simply. “She had just
been telling me that----that Mr. Strangemore had gone abroad again,
when the door into the hall there suddenly opened wide. We both looked
up, and we saw that woman----I mean Sibyl St. Alban----standing in the
door, clad in a soft, loose white dress, with her hair hanging down
over her shoulders. When she saw us looking at her she turned around
and fled from us.”
A renewed chorus of groans and whispers greeted Nina’s words. Even Miss
Drusilla looked pale and troubled. She gazed blankly into Nina’s face.
“Are you quite sure, my love, that it was Mrs. St. Alban?” she asked.
“I am perfectly certain of it,” was the confident reply, and then the
girl burst out, reproachfully, “Oh, Aunt Drusilla, I did not think you
could have tolerated that woman here so long! Why is she here still? It
cannot be that Talbot has already married her and made her the mistress
of my home?”
They gazed at her blankly, what wild words was she saying?
“Nina, where have you been all this time?” her aunt asked, with seeming
irrelevance.
“I have been in Baltimore!”
“So near, and not know all that has happened at Selwyn Heights since
you went away? Are you jesting with me, child?”
“No, I am telling you the truth, dear Aunt Drusilla. I have been very
ill for months. I know nothing, I have heard nothing, I have not
read a newspaper since I went away. What has happened? Tell me, Aunt
Drusilla,” said the girl, with innocent unconsciousness.
Miss Drusilla groaned, and did not answer. Nina looked at Kitty.
“Has anything bad happened? Tell me the truth,” she said.
Kitty answered, agitatedly:
“Mrs. St. Alban is dead, Miss Nina!”
* * * * *
After one moment’s blank, shocked silence, a cry of amaze burst from
Nina’s lips:
“Are you mad, Kitty? Did I not see Mrs. St. Alban there in the door
looking at me ten minutes ago?”
“You saw her ghost, dear Miss Nina,” said the girl, solemnly, “Mrs.
St. Alban is dead and buried long ago, but they do say that bad people
can’t rest in their graves, and so I guess that is why her spirit walks
at night.”
A great tremor ran over Nina at the maid’s dreadful words. Her sweet
face grew ashen, she leaned against Kitty for support.
“Dead,” she murmured, in a tone of awe and wonder. “How long has it
been, Aunt Drusilla?”
“About three days after you went away,” the old lady replied, and the
wonder in Nina’s eyes grew deeper.
“But she was young and well and strong,” she said, “What was it that
killed her so suddenly?”
Miss Drusilla’s heart gave a great throb of dread. She answered almost
against her own will:
“She was murdered!”
She never forgot Nina’s ghastly white, horrified face, and she hurried
on to the end of her story for fear the girl would faint.
“Someone went into her room the very night you went away and stabbed
her in the breast with a sharp dagger.”
“Oh, my God, how horrible!” shivered the girl, “Oh, she was hard, she
was cruel and relentless, but she was so beautiful, so weak, who could
have had the heart to kill her? Who did it, Aunt Drusilla? Who murdered
Mrs. St. Alban?”
Miss Drusilla turned away from the appealing look in those dark eyes.
She could not speak.
“Who was it, Kitty?” said the girl, startled by Miss Strangemore’s
emotion, “It was not, oh, no, no, never--it was not my husband?”
“No, it was not Mr. Strangemore,” several voices answered her at once.
Nina clasped her hands together.
“Oh, I am so glad,” she cried. “You all acted so strangely I knew not
what to think. But who was it, then, that killed Mrs. St. Alban? Aunt
Drusilla, why don’t you speak to me?”
Thus adjured Miss Drusilla’s pale lips parted stiffly, and she
answered, desperately.
“I don’t know what to say to you, Nina!”
“Was there ever such a strange answer given to anyone,” Nina asked
herself in wonder, and she looked back at her maid.
“And you, Kitty,” she said, “Are you dumb, too, because you know not
what to say to me? Can’t you tell me who killed Mrs. St. Alban?”
“Miss Nina, darling, I don’t know who killed her!” the maid responded,
doggedly.
The answer was simple enough but Nina’s strained, alert senses detected
something beyond it.
“You are keeping something back from me, all of you,” she said, looking
round upon their white, scared faces.
“Lucy,” she added, turning around to the chambermaid, who was regarding
her through a swift rain of quick tears, “why are you crying, child?”
“About you, Mrs. Strangemore,” sobbed the girl, “because--because--that
bad, wicked woman said before she died that it was--was _you_ that had
killed her!”
Those words blurted out by Lucy in her grief, seemed to have killed
Nina too, for a moment. She stood still an instant like one transfixed,
her form and face rigid and statue-like, her white features looking
marble-like, and her eyes wild and wide with horror. Presently one
single word, uttered in tones of deepest dismay and wonder, fell from
her blanched lips:
“I!”
“Yes, you, Miss Nina,” Lucy reiterated. “She made them put it down upon
a paper that you had stole into her room and killed her and then run
away!”
“My God!” the poor girl uttered, in a voice of horror, and then her
voice failed her. She reeled dizzily a moment, then dropped heavily,
like one dead, to the floor.